A new novel of mine, The Ash Tree, has been published by West of West Books in conjunction with the April 24, 2015 centenary of the Armenian genocide; it recounts the lives of an Armenian-American family and the sweep of their history in the twentieth century - particularly from the points of view of two women in the family as it builds a new life in California.

There are three other novels of mine - one is Pathological States, about a physician's family in L.A. in 1962, which is as yet unpublished; another is Hungry Generations, about a young composer's friendship in L.A. with the family of a virtuoso pianist, published on demand by iUniverse; and Acts of Terror and Contrition - a nuclear fable - is my political novella (with eight stories) from Amazon's Createspace, about Israel and its reactions to the first Iraq War in 1990 (with the fear then that Saddam Hussein's missile bombardment might contain a nuclear weapon).From a review of "Acts" on Amazon.com:"At times the reader races ahead to find out the fate of the cast of characters and the fate of nations. At others the reader is stopped mid-page to consider the paradoxes of the nuclear world and the world of realpolitik. This is an important, timely book that deserves a wide audience." For a fuller description of them, look for the relevant blog posts below or click on one of the Amazon.com links. KINDLE editions of these novels are also available.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Beethoven xi: "making music"

There is a photograph of me when I was eight or so, sitting on one of the upper stairs in our house and looking down at the hall, through the vertical bars of the banister. My open and rather serious face suggests that I was interrupted in the midst of listening to the music from downstairs, for my unpredictable older brother had just snapped a picture of me with his frequent clicks and flashes. A moment before, I had been listening to my father playing second violin in his weekly Friday night string quartet in Los Angeles (this evening in our living room).

One of Haydn’s scores of quartets and then one of Mozart’s nearly a dozen quartets were usually played by the four musicians, and the evening would often conclude with one of Beethoven’s six opus 18 quartets or one of the three from opus 59 (though sometimes one by Schubert or, if they were feeling ambitious, one by Brahms). Particularly Beethoven’s early quartets, opus 18, published when the composer was thirty, were a source of great pleasure to the players, usually two or three skilled amateurs including my father, and one or two professionals. I loved to listen from my perch in the hall stairwell to the four men “making music” – it was as if I were privileged to witness the process of building or sculpting or painting a masterpiece.

“Making music” is the phrase my father used, and it’s particularly relevant to Beethoven and especially significant for the early period chamber works and piano sonatas. One of the ideas I hope to develop in my Beethoven project is the idea that the performers of his sonatas and quartets, etc., feel as if they are participating in the construction of the piece, the working out of motifs, the resolution of tensions, the upwellings of feeling: in short, we feel we are participating with Beethoven in making the music – the phrase which the philosopher Barthes employed for this experience is “musica practica.” This phenomenon is distinct from the sometimes virtuosic displays of professional musicians; it is rather to feel one is actively in touch with the unfolding form of the music. When I play through a Beethoven sonata or when my father and his musician friends played a Beethoven quartet, the experience seems like that of a sort of co-creator. Why this should be the case particularly with Beethoven is the question I will try to explore.

Buy "Hungry Generations" here - a novel about L.A. and European expatriates living there.

Purchase "Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music" here.

About Me

"The Ash Tree" about a family of Armenian-Americans, from 1915 to the early 1970s, is being published April 24, 2015, on the centenary of the Armenian Genocide. My 2004 novel "Hungry Generations" is about the encounter between a young composer in L.A. in the 70s and the family of a great virtuoso pianist, who knew Schoenberg and Stravinsky there in the 40s. Also, there's my critical book on modern fiction and music, "Fullness of Dissonance" (1994), as well as various stories and articles in print. My novella and story collection "Acts of Terror and Contrition" was published in 2011. Current projects: "Pathological States" (an unpublished novel), "Conrad in the Twentieth Century" and "Beethoven and modernity" (both non-fiction books). I'm married to the artist Jeanette Arax Melnick, whose paintings are on the cover of three of my books. You can contact me either by leaving a comment on a post or at danielcmelnick@gmail.com.